How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God

Part VIII: Classical Spirituality

 

Several years ago, I was having dinner with a good friend, and we began to talk about a mutual friend whom I had not heard from in several years. I had become convinced that this former friend was angry at me. My dinner friend thought I might be jumping to conclusions, and since this mutual friend was on Facebook, she suggested I simply send our mutual friend a friend request.

 

And so, I did, and she responded immediately, telling me how good it was to hear from me. She ended up reading both of my books and we had long telephone conversations about our lives and spiritual journeys. 

 

In like manner, it was time to overcome the distance I felt from God after the deaths of my parents. In my early seminary and parish years, you might say I had a cordial relationship with God, but it did not in any way approach the depths of intimacy and love that the great spiritual writers of all ages have described.

 

It was now time to move in that direction. I had taken the course described in the previous post on Process Theology that helped me see that God did not cause the deaths of my parents or Pauline. I had changed my view of how God is related to the world and our suffering, with the result, as I wrote in the last post, “I can now report that my new understanding of God’s relationship to the world really did change my experience of God and grief. This time, unlike after my parents had died, I felt God’s presence and unrelenting love every step of the way. Rather than finding myself driven away from God, my spirituality grew deeper and deeper as I allowed God to be with me step by step, day by day, guiding me into the future, trusting that my life was not over but would find new beginnings.” I now, for the first time, felt God’s presence through what I call Classical Spirituality. 

 

Growing up as a Lutheran Prairie Pietist (see Part II), I never encountered the term “spirituality.” We were proud Second Article Christians. We believed we were sinners, and that Jesus Christ (Second Article) had forgiven and saved us, and that is about all we needed to know. We weren’t much interested in the Third Article: life in the Holy Spirit. We left that to the Catholics, with their theology of Mary, their icons, their crucifixes, their stations of the cross. We were quite sure Catholics used spirituality to try to earn their salvation, and thus we viewed it as a form of “works righteousness” and “life under the law.”

 

A couple of months after Pauline died, I was at a Lutheran retreat at a monastery on the Pacific Ocean, focused on stewardship. When you are in severe grief, it is hard to think of a topic of less interest to one than stewardship. Bored to the core, I wandered into the monastery library. Scattered on a reading table were three books: one by Thomas Merton, one by Henri Nouwen, and one on the theology of celibacy. I started reading the last of these three and was intrigued: maybe that is the way I should think of the rest of my life: maybe I should remain single, like a celibate priest. Then I looked at the Thomas Merton book, Thoughts in Solitude, and came upon this reflection:

 

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

 

It would be difficult to overstate the way these few words pierced my heart. Merton captured perfectly the struggle in my life, caught up way too much in the past, but uncertain as to how to move meaningfully into the future.

 

One morning soon after, after a restless night’s sleep, I awoke with a sense of new insight, a dawning revelation. I finally began to realize that the weakness I was operating out of was the trying to control what I could not control. I was allowing everyone and everything around me to determine how I felt and thus needed to control outcomes of events in order to ensure my own happiness. I wanted life to give me a break, but there was no way to guarantee that. I knew that pain, could follow pain, could follow pain.

        

This was my weakness. I had no inner strength. Like a sponge, I was at the mercy of having to absorb whatever flowed my way, whether wine or vinegar. I was lacking a deep spirituality and awareness of my call. I was weak in body, weak in spirit, and, therefore, weak psychologically.

 

I bolted out of bed, put on running clothes, and ran in the cool air until I was tired. When I came home, I listened to music and read scripture and excerpts from spiritual books by Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen, reflecting and praying on what I was reading and hearing. Then, with cracking voice that had not awakened yet to the day, I picked out a song and began to play guitar and sing. Again, I turned on the music, and listened as I finished preparing to go to work.    I heard from John Michael Talbot the words I needed to hear. He was singing a song based on Psalm 62:

 

Only in God is my soul at rest,

  In Him comes my salvation.

He only is my rock,

  my strength and my salvation.

My stronghold, my Savior,

  I shall not be afraid at all.

My stronghold, my Savior,

  I shall not be moved.

 

Only in God is found safety,

  When enemy pursues me.

Only in God is found glory,

  When I am found weak and found lowly.

 

My stronghold, my Savior,

  I shall not be afraid at all.

My stronghold, my Savior,

  I shall not be moved.

 

Only in God is my soul at rest,

               In Him comes my salvation.

                 --John Michael Talbot, “Psalm 62”

 

That day I entered the office with a new sense of life. I felt closer to God. I felt relaxed, and open to those around me, ready to carry on whatever ministry needed to be done.

 

Each day I continued the same routine and each day I became more aware of the beauty of life, more present to others, more able to trust myself to God.  A week earlier I had cried out, “My God, when will the pain ever end?” Now I had received an answer: “Pain will always be there. It will never end. But I will give you the strength to bear it, to use it, to grow through it.”

 

I had wondered if my new theology--that God did not cause Pauline’s suffering and death--would lead me to feel closer to God than I had after the deaths of Mom and Dad. It had indeed. But now I was going a step further. I was not only able to pray to God, to feel close to God, but to rely on God to uplift and carry me regardless of what happened next in my day, or in my life. Having lost the people most important to me, I now turned myself over to God more fully than ever before. Rather than continually lament what I had lost, I was slowly beginning to open myself to the beauty of the world still before me, my place in that world, my new calling in that world. How good it was to want to live and love again, to have hope, and to be able to feel trust. No matter what the future held, I trusted that God had a purpose for my life.

      

God had been so patient with me and now I had to be patient with myself. Like a fawn newly born, I felt ready to run straight away into the meadows of my new life, even if my legs were still wobbly. I knew that I would stagger and fall, but Mother God would pick me up and nurse my wounds.

 

As long as we live and love, we will experience grief over the loss of those we want to be close to and cannot. Once one understands that grief never ends, then it doesn’t matter so much where one is in the grieving process. What does matter is that one begins to find a reason to live again, to love again.

 

I promised myself that, although I would continue to shed many tears for Pauline and for others I had lost and would lose, those tears would not simply carry me back into the past but would become a river that carried me into the future. They would remind me of how much I have been loved, how much I have loved, and that I was called to continue to love and be loved as long as there is breath within me. 

       

John Michael Talbot’s lyrics once again captured my feelings:     

 

My God, and my all,

I should like to love you,

And give you my heart,

And give you my soul.

And so I will yearn for you,

In the depths of your passion,

Show me the way to love,

Show me the way to give my life for you.

 

Show me the way to love,

Then we will surely rise,

To fly like an eagle, through the wind,

To find in your dying, Lord,

We both shall live again. So fly  . . . . .

 

So I will weep with you,

In the depth of your passion,

I will not be ashamed,

To travel the world,

Weeping out loud for love,

Show me the way to love,

Show me the way to love,

Then we will surely rise.

               --“My God and My All”

Note: If you are interested in exploring the twelve classical spiritual disciplines, see Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline:

The inward Disciplines of meditation, prayer, fasting, and study offer avenues of personal examination and change. The outward Disciplines of simplicity, solitude, submission, and service help prepare us to make the world a better place. The corporate Disciplines of confession, worship, guidance, and celebration bring us nearer to one another and to God